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The Green One behind the Worlds Columbus • Don Quixote • William Shakespeare, Francis Bacon and the Green One

WHEN IN 1492 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS reached the mouth of the Orinoco he believed he had found the Gihon, one of the four rivers that flow out of Eden. He wrote home: ‘There are great indications suggesting the proximity of the earthly Paradise, for not only does it correspond in mathematical position with the opinions of the holy and learned theologians, but all other sages concur to make it probable.’

The impulse to discover everything about the world that would inspire the scientific revolution was also inspiring men to voyages of exploration. Never had wonder at the material world been so strong.

Hopes of finding a New World were inextricably connected with expectations of a new Golden Age, but the gold found turned out to be the more earthly kind.

Much has been made of Columbus’s connections with the Knights Templar. He was married to a daughter of a former Grand Master of the Knights of Christ, a Portuguese order that had grown up after the Templars had been driven underground. It’s been noted as significant that Columbus navigated ships whose sails carried the distinctive red cross ‘patte’ of the Templars. But the reality is that the Knights of Christ did not pursue the same independent commerce with the spirit worlds that had pushed the Papacy to such desperate measures in the case of the Templars. As with other later crypto-Templar orders such as the Knights of Malta, Rome was here adopting the powerfully glamorous mystique of the original Knights Templar, and using it for its own purposes.

Columbus wrote to Queen Isabella expressing hope that he would find a ‘barrel of gold’ that would finance the reconquest of Jerusalem, just as she and her husband, Ferdinand, had recently managed the reconquest of Granada, bringing Spain back to the Church. Columbus did not know that that gold would be needed to fund a war against an enemy nearer home and fast growing in strength - an enemy with much greater claims to be called the spiritual heir of the Knights Templar.

The battle lines for control of the world were being drawn, not only geopolitically, but in the spirit worlds, too. It would be a battle for the whole spirit of humanity.

CERVANTES AND SHAKESPEARE WERE pretty nearly exact contemporaries.

Don Quixote, the elderly knight who tilts at windmills, believing them to be giants, and who sees a squat, garlic-chewing peasant girl as a beautiful, aristocratic maiden out of tales of chivalry, called Dulcinea, might at first seem like a character in a rather knock-about comedy. But as the story progresses its tone changes and the reader senses some strange magic at work.

On one level Don Quixote is trying to insist on the old chivalric ideals of the Middle Ages as they pass away. On another he is entering his ‘second childhood’, harking back to a time when imaginings seemed so much more real. The point is, of course, that in esoteric philosophy imaginings aremore real. Some Spanish scholars have argued on the basis of a close textual analysis that Don Quixote is an allegorical commentary on the cabalistic Zohar (or Book of Splendour).

At one point in the story Don Quixote and his down-to-earth servant Sancho Panza are tricked by Merlin into believing that the beautiful Dulcinea has been bewitched so that she looks like a squat peasant girl. Apparently the only way she can regain her beautiful form is if Sancho Panza submits to a beating of 3300 lashes. We shall return to examine the significance of the number thirty-three shortly.

An account of an initiation lies at the heart of the novel. It marks the point when simple-minded comedy gives way to something more troubling and ambiguous. This is the strange episode of the Don’s descent into the Cave of Montesinos …

Sancho Panza tied a rope a hundred fathoms long to his master’s doublet, then lowered him through the mouth of the cave, Don Quixote hacking his way through brambles, briars and fig trees, dislodging crows and rooks.

At the bottom of the cave the Don could not stop himself falling into a deep, deep sleep. He awoke to found himself in a beautiful meadow. But unlike in a dream he could think reasonably …

He approached a vast palace of crystal where he was met by a strange old man in a green satin hood, who introduced himself as Montesinos. This man, evidently the genius of the transparent palace, told him he had long been expected. He took the Don to a downstairs chamber and showed him a knight lying on a marble sepulchre. This knight had been bewitched by Merlin, Montesinos told him. Furthermore, he said, Merlin had prophesied that he, Don Quixote, would break the spell, and so would revive knight errantry …

Don Quixote returned to the surface and asked Sancho Panza how long he had been gone. Told not more than hour, Don Quixote said this could not be, that he had spent three days underground. He said he saw what he saw, touched what he touched.

You’re saying the most foolish things imaginable, said Sancho Panza.

The whole novel is a play on enchantment, illusion, disillusion - and a deeper level of enchantment. It reads like a series of parables in which the meaning is never explicitly stated and never quite clear. But the deepest level of meaning has to do with the role of imagination in forming the world. Don Quixote is not just a buffoon. He is somebody who has the strongest desire to have his innermost questions answered. He is being shown that material reality is just one of many layers of illusions, and that it is our deepest imaginings that form them. The implication is that if we can locate the secret source of our imaginings, we can control the flow of nature. By the end of the novel the Don has subtlely changed his surroundings.

We saw earlier that when we are in love we choose to see the good qualities in the one we love. We saw how our good-heartedness helps to bring out these qualities and make them stronger. The reverse is also true. Those we despise become despicable.

A similar choice confronts us when we contemplate the cosmos as a whole. Cervantes was writing at a turning point in history when people no longer knew for sure that the world is a spiritual place with goodness and meaning at its heart. What Cervantes is saying is that if, like Don Quixote, we good-heartedly decide to believe in the essential goodness of the world, despite the brickbats of fortune, despite the slapstick tendency in things that seems to contradict such spiritual beliefs and make them look foolish and absurd, then that decision to believe will help transform the world - and in a supernatural way, too.

Don Quixote is reckless in his good-heartedness. He takes an extreme and painful path. He has been called the Spanish Christ, and the effect of his journey on world history has been quite as great as if he had really lived.

CERVANTES DIED ON 23 APRIL 1616, the same date as Shakespeare.

The sparse traces left by William Shakespeare in the written records yield few definite facts. We know he was born in the village of Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564, that he was educated at the village school, became a butcher’s apprentice and was caught poaching. He left Stratford for London where he became a bit-part player in a company at one time under the patronage of Francis Bacon, and many successful plays were performed, the published versions of which bear his name. He died leaving his second best bed to his wife in his will.

His contemporary, the playwright Ben Jonson, said sneeringly of William Shakespeare that he knew ‘small Latin and less Greek’. How could such a man have created a body of work, saturated in all the erudition of the age?

Many great contemporaries have been pushed forward as the true author of Shakespeare’s plays, including his patron, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford, Christopher Marlowe (working on the theory that he wasn’t really murdered in 1593, just as the plays of Shakespeare began to appear), and latterly the poet John Donne. An American scholar, Margaret Demorest, has noted the strange links between Donne and Shakespeare, the likeness of their portraits, the similarity in nicknames, ‘Johannes factotum’ for Shakespeare and ‘Johannes Factus’ for Donne, odd idiosyncrasies in spelling - both use cherubin for cherubim, for example - and the fact that Donne’s publications begin when Shakespeare’s cease.

But the most popular candidate is, of course, Francis Bacon.

An infant prodigy, Francis Bacon was born into a family of courtiers in 1561. At the age of twelve a masque he had written, The Birth of Merlin, was performed before Queen Elizabeth I, who knew him affectionately as her little Lord Keeper. He was a small, weak, sickly child and his schoolfellows teased him by calling him by a pun on his name, Hamlet, or ‘little ham’. He was educated at Oxford and when, despite the Queen’s earlier fondness for him, he was blocked again and again in his political ambitions, he conceived an ambition to build himself an ‘Empire of learning’, conquering every branch of erudition known to man. His intellectual brilliance was such that he became known as the ‘wonder of the ages’. He wrote books that dominated the intellectual life of his day, including The Advancement of Learning, the Novum Organon, in which he proposed a radical new approach to scientific thinking, and The New Atlantis, a vision of a new world order. Part inspired by Plato’s vision of Atlantis, this would prove very influential on esoteric groups in the modern world. When James I came to the throne Bacon quickly achieved his long-held ambition and became Lord Chancellor, the second most powerful post in the land. One of Bacon’s responsibilities was the distribution of land grants in the New World.

Bacon’s brilliance was such that it seemed to cover the whole world, and, all other things being equal, he might seem to be a better candidate for the author of the plays of Shakespeare than Shakespeare himself.

Bacon was a member of a secret society called the Order of the Helmet. In The Advancement of Learning, he wrote of a tradition of handing down parables in a chain of succession and with them hidden meanings on the ‘secrets of the sciences’. He admitted he was fascinated by secret codes and numerological ciphers. In the 1623 edition of The Advancement of Learning he explained what he calls the Bilateral Cipher - which would later become the basis of the Morse Code.

It is interesting to note that his favourite code was the ancient ‘cabalistic cipher’ in terms of which the name ‘Bacon’ has the numerical value thirty-three. Using this same cipher, the phrase ‘Fra Rosi Crosse’ can be founded encoded on the frontispiece, dedication page and other significant pages in The Advancement of Learning.

And using the same cipher, the same Rosicrucian phrase can also be found in the dedication in the Shakespeare Folio, on the first page of The Tempest and on the Shakespeare monument in Stratford-upon-Avon. The rolled scroll on the Shakespeare Memorial in Westminster Abbey also has it, together with the number thirty-three, which we have just seen is the number for Bacon.

IN ORDER TO UNDERSTAND THE SOLUTION to this mystery given in the secret history, it is necessary first to take a look at the work.

The plays of Shakespeare play with altered states, with the madness of love. Hamlet and Ophelia are descended from the Troubadours. There are wise fools - like Feste in Twelfth Night. In Lear’s Fool, the Christ-like jester who tells the truth when no one else dares, the fool of the Troubadors achieves apotheosis.

The characters of Gargantua, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza inhabit the collective imagination. They help form our attitudes to life. But as Harold Bloom, Professor of Humanities at Yale University and author of the key book Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, has shown, no single writer has populated our imagination with archetypes like Shakespeare: Falstaff, Hamlet, Ophelia, Lear, Prospero, Caliban, Bottom, Othello, Iago, Malvolio, Macbeth and his Lady, Romeo and Juliet. In fact, after Jesus Christ no other individual has done so much to develop and expand the human sense of an interior life. If Jesus Christ planted the seed of interior life, Shakespeare helped it to grow, populated it and gave us the sense we all have today that we each contain inside us an inner cosmos as expansive as the outer cosmos.

Great writers are the architects of our consciousness, in Rabelais, Cervantes and Shakespeare, above all in the soliloquies of Hamlet, we also see the seeds of the sense we have today of personal turning points, vital decisions to be made. Before the great writers of the Renaissance, any inkling of such things could only have come from sermons.

RIGHT The History of the World, 1614. Sir Walter Raleigh, the famous adventurer, was a member of a secret society called the School of Night. So shadowy was this society that some recent critics have even doubted its existence, but Raleigh undoubtedly shared esoteric ideas with Christopher Marlowe and George Chapman, author of The Shadow of Night. One of the secrets they kept was ‘atheism’. Raleigh feared the prolonged torture, disembowelling and slow death that had overtaken another friend, Thomas Kyd, for professing atheistic views. But none of them was an atheist in the modern sense of denying the reality of spirit worlds or denying that disembodied beings intervened in the material world in a supernatural way. In Faust Marlowe wrote one of the most learned, esoteric works of world literature dealing with the dangers of commerce with the spirit worlds.

There was a brilliant analysis of this frontispiece of his literary masterpiece by David Fideler in the much-missed Gnosis magazine. On one level, says Fideler, it was meant to illustrate Raleigh’s view of history as the unfolding of Divine Providence according to Cicero’s definition: ‘History bears witness to the passing of the ages, sheds light upon reality, gives life to recollection and guidance to human existence, and brings tidings of ancient days.’ On another level, he points out, this design embodies the cabalistic Tree of Life with planetary correspondences at the nodes. The figure on the left is Bon Fama, the Fama of the Rosicrucian Manifestoes.

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There is a shadowy side to this new interior richness, which, again, we see most clearly in the soliloquies of Hamlet. The new sense of detachment that allows someone to withdraw from the senses and roam around his interior world is double-edged, carrying with it the danger of feeling alienated from the world. Hamlet languishes in just such a state of alienation when he is not sure whether it is better ‘to be or not to be’. This is a long way from the cry of Achilles, who wanted to live in the light of the sun at all costs.

As an initiate Shakespeare was helping to forge the new form of consciousness. But how do we know Shakespeare was an initiate?

In the Anglo-Saxon countries at least Shakespeare has done more than any other writer to form our idea of beings from the spirit worlds and the way they may sometimes break into the material world. We need only think of Ariel, Caliban, Puck, Oberon and Titania. Many thespians still believe that Macbeth contains dangerous occult formulae that give it the force of a magical ceremony when performed. Prospero in The Tempest is the archetype of the Magus, based on Elizabeth’s court astrologer Dr Dee. A spirit spoke to Dee on 24 March 1583, talking about the future course of nature and reason, saying, ‘New Worlds shall spring of these. New manners; strange Men.’ Compare this with ‘O wonder! How beauteous mankind is. O brave new world, that has such people in it.’

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Initiatic images of meditating on a skull, often found in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from Hamlet through the brooding monks of Zurbarán to the posing of Byron. These are not mere reminders that one day we must die. The skull meditation alludes to arcane techniques of invoking the spirits of dead ancestors - techniques inherited and nurtured by secret societies such as the Rosicrucians and the Jesuits.

When we enter the Green Wood of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the other comedies we are re-entering the ancient wood we walked through in Chapter 2. We are returning to an archaic form of consciousness in which all nature is animated by spirits. In all art and literature twisted vegetation usually signals we are entering the realm of the esoteric, the etheric dimension. Shakespeare’s writing is, of course, dense with flower imagery. Critics have often commented on the use of the rose as an occult, Rosicrucian symbol in The Faerie Queene, written by Edmund Spenser in 1589, but no writer in English has used the symbol of the rose more often - or more occultly - than Shakespeare. There are seven roses on the memorial to Shakespeare in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon, and, as we shall see shortly, the seven roses are the Rosicrucian symbol of the chakras.

It is here that one of the distinctions created by modern, positivist philosophy may prove useful. According to logical positivism an apparent assertion is really asserting nothing if no evidence would disprove it. This argument is sometimes used to try to disprove the existence of God. If no conceivable turn of events would ever count against the existence of God, it is argued, then by asserting that God exists we are not really asserting anything.

In some religious orders, the novitiate lies in a coffin between four candles, the Miserere is sung and he then rises to be given a new name as a sign of rebirth. Painting by Francisco Zurbarán.

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Looked at in this way the assertion ‘the historical personage Shakespeare wrote the plays that bear his name’ actually asserts very little. We know so little about the man that it has no bearing at all on our understanding of the plays. Shakespeare is an enigma. Like Jesus Christ he revolutionized human consciousness yet left almost invisible traces on the contemporary historical record.

In order finally to get to grips with this mystery and to understand better the literary Renaissance that overtook England at this time, we must examine the largely overlooked Sufi content in the plays of Shakespeare. Sufism, we saw, was the great source of the rose as a mystical symbol.

The basic plot of The Taming of the Shrew comes from the A Thousand and One Nights. The Arab title of A Thousand And One Nights, ALF LAYLA WA LAYLA, is a coded phrase meaning Mother of Records. This is an allusion to the tradition that there lies hidden underneath the paws of the Sphinx, or in a parallel dimension, a secret library or ‘Hall of Records’, a storehouse of ancient wisdom from before the Flood. The title A Thousand and One Nights means to tell us, therefore, that the secrets of human evolution are encoded within.

Illustration to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The word ‘fairy’ entered the English language in the thirteenth century from the old English word to marvel and originally referred to a state of mind - feyrie or fayrie meaning the state of being enchanted. J.R.R. Tolkein defined faerie as ‘beauty that is an enchantment’.

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The main story of The Taming of the Shrew comes from The Sleeper and the Watcher, a story in which Haroun al Raschid puts a gullible young man into a deep sleep, dresses him in royal clothes and tells his servants to treat him as if he really is the Caliph when he awakes.

This, then, is a story about altered states of consciousness - and both story and play contain descriptions of how a higher state of consciousness may be achieved.

The outer, framing plot of The Taming of the Shrew centres on Christopher Sly. In Sufi lore a sly man is an initiate, or member, of a secret brotherhood. Christopher Sly is described in the first folio as a beggar, another Sufi code word, a Sufi being ‘a beggar at the door of love’.

Early in the play Sly says: ‘the Slys are no rogues. Look at the Chronicles. We came in with Richard the Conqueror.’ This is a reference to the Sufi influence that Crusaders brought back from the Crusades.

Sly is also shown as a drunkard. As noted earlier, drunkenness is a common Sufi symbol for a visionary state of consciousness.

Then Sly is woken up by a Lord, which is to say that he is instructed by his spiritual master on how to awaken to higher states of consciousness.

The story that follows, the taming of the shrewish Katharina by Petruchio, is on one level an allegory of the Lord’s ‘awakening’ of his pupil. Petruchio employs sly methods to tame Katharina. She represents what in Buddhist terminology is sometimes called ‘monkey mind’, the never quiet, never still, always gibbering part of the mind that distracts us from spiritual realities. Petruchio tries to teach her to abandon all preconceptions, all her old habits of thinking. Katherina must learn to think upside down and inside out:

I’ll attend her here -

And woo her with some spirit when she comes!

Say that she rail, why then I’ll tell her plain

She sings as sweetly as a nightingale.

Say that she frown, I’ll say she looks as clear

As morning roses newly washed with dew.

Say she be mute and will not speak a word,

Then I’ll commend her volubility

And say she uttered piercing eloquence …

As we saw in Chapter 17, Sufis trace the origins of their brotherhood further back than Mohammed. Some trace its chain of transmission back to the prophet Elijah or ‘the Green One’. The mystical, edgy spirit of the Green One pervades both A Thousand and One Nights and The Taming of the Shrew.

THERE IS A STORY ABOUT THE GREEN ONE which conveys something of these qualities.

The witness to this strange series of events was standing by the banks of the River Oxus when he saw someone fall in. He then saw a dervish run down to help the drowning man, only to be dragged in himself. All of a sudden, as if from nowhere, another man dressed in a shimmering, luminous green robe appeared, and he too flung himself into the water.

It was at this point that things began to turn really strange. When the green man resurfaced, he had magically transformed into a log. The other two managed to cling on to this log and float to the river bank. The two of them climbed out safely.

But the witness was more interested in what happened to the log, and he followed it as it floated further downstream.

Eventually it bumped up against the river bank. Watching from behind a bush, the witness was astonished to see it change back into the green-robed man, who crawled out, bedraggled, but then - in an instant - dry again.

Coming out from behind the bush, the man who had been watching all this felt compelled to throw himself on the ground in front of this mysterious figure. ‘You must be the Green One, Master of Saints. Bless me, for I would attain.’ He was afraid to touch the robe, because now he was close enough to see it was made of green fire.

‘You have seen too much,’ replied the Green One. ‘You must understand that I am from another world. Without their knowing it, I protect those who have a service to perform.’

The man raised his eyes from the ground, but the Green One had disappeared, leaving only the sound of rushing wind.

A YOUNGER CONTEMPORARY OF Shakespeare’s, Robert Burton, wrote in The Anatomy of Melancholy ‘that omniscient, only wise fraternity of the Rosie Cross names their head Elias Artifex, their theophrastian master’. Burton then describes him as ‘the renewer of all arts and sciences, reformer of the world and now living’ (my italics).

We have already seen how in the esoteric tradition Elijah is believed to have reincarnated as John the Baptist. His return was prophesied not only in the last words of the Old Testament but by the initiate-prophet Joachim, who profoundly influenced the Rosicrucians’ understanding of history. Joachim said Elijah would come to prepare the way for the third age. Did the secret societies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries believe that he had reincarnated in their own time and that he was protecting and guiding those with a service to perform?

In Chapter 13 we looked at rather disturbing stories of Elijah and Elisha, his successor. The time has come to consider that in the secret history these passages in the Old Testament are not a description of two separate individuals. Rather, Elijah is such a highly evolved being that not only is he able to incarnate, discarnate and reincarnate at will, he is also able to parcel up bits of his spirit - or mantle - and distribute it among several different people.

Just as a flock of birds turn as one, moved by the same thought, so also several people may be moved simultaneously by the same spirit. Lurking in the darkness behind the surface glitter of Elizabethan England, speaking through the minds of Marlowe, Shakespeare, Bacon, Donne and Cervantes we should be able to make out the stern visage of the Green One, spiritual master of Sufis and architect of the modern age.

We shall look at the aim of Elijah’s mission in the last chapter, but for the moment it is as well to recall the role that Arabia played in inspiring not only literature but science. At the court of Haroun al Raschid and later among the Arab peoples, science had made great leaps forward, particularly in mathematics, physics and astronomy. There is a deep mystical connection between the Arab people and the English, because it was the great Arabian spirit of scientific research which lived again in Francis Bacon, the individual most closely associated with Shakespeare in the occult literature. And, as the history of the philosophy of science tell us, it was Bacon who inspired the great scientific revolution that has done so much to form the modern world.

As the inner cosmos was opened up and illumined, so, too, the material cosmos was opened up and illumined. As Shakespeare revealed a world not of character types, which is what had gone before, but a jostling crowd of fully realized individuals, seething with passion and fired by ideas, so Bacon revealed a world bursting with quiddity, a scintillating world of infinitely various, sharply defined objects.

These parallel worlds ballooned and became mirror images of one another. Inner and outer worlds that had previously been darkly and indistinctly intermingled were now clearly separated.

The world of Shakespeare is the world of human values, where, whatever happens, it is human happiness and the shape of human lives that are at stake. The world of Bacon is one where human values have been stripped out.

Human experience is the tricky, paradoxical, mysterious and ultimately unpredictable thing that Shakespeare dramatized. Bacon taught humankind to look at the physical objects that are the contents of experience and to note the predictable laws they obey.

He devised new ways of thinking about the contents of experience. He advised the discarding of as many preconceptions as possible while gathering as much data as possible, trying not to impose patterns on it, but waiting patiently for deeper, richer patterns to emerge. This is why in the history of the philosophy of science he is known as the Father of Induction.

In short, Bacon realized that if you can observe objects as objectively as possible very different patterns emerge from the ones that give subjective experience its structure.

This realization would change the face of the planet.

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